Syntactic Competence of Heritage Speakers at Advanced Levels of Oral Proficiency: Evidence from L2 Korean

Abstract

This study investigates syntactic competence in heritage speakers and second language (L2) learners of Korean. Using a grammaticality judgment task, data were collected on seven different syntactic features of Korean from 28 heritage speakers, 13 L2 learners at 2, 2+ and 3 on the ILR oral proficiency scale (OPI), and 14 native controls. The test battery of the experiment showed high internal reliability in most grammatical domains and significant correlations between mean accuracy scores and ILR proficiency levels. In addition, mean comparisons between heritage speakers and L2 learners within each oral proficiency level indicated that heritage speakers’ advantages in L2 syntax are likely to be found from low to intermediate levels, but not at very advanced, native-like levels of oral proficiency (i.e., ILR 3 in this study). This study provides a new type of evidence that the frequently-found advantage of heritage speakers in syntactic competence in lower proficiency levels in previous studies may not exist at the advanced level of oral proficiency. L2 learners’ syntactic competence becomes as robust as heritage speakers’ at the same level of very advanced oral proficiency. Still, the syntactic competence of these two groups does not reach the level of native speakers’, supporting the previous findings of incomplete acquisition of heritage speakers.